


When You're Gone

by Not_So_Secretly_a_Spaceship, Wolf_Storm



Series: A Pile Of Bones [11]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Multi, Post-Rogue One, Post-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Pre-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Rebelcaptain 4ever, Separations, Survival, The Author Regrets Nothing, Undercover Missions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 14:56:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14083425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_So_Secretly_a_Spaceship/pseuds/Not_So_Secretly_a_Spaceship, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf_Storm/pseuds/Wolf_Storm
Summary: No, that is not a line of thought Jyn wants to pursue. Cassian isn’t gone yet, it’s preliminary to already start burying him. He’s sitting right next to her, for fuck’s sake.He shrugs. “A year, they think. Maybe more.”A year with no contact with him, no way of knowing whether he’s still alive, no way to know what date to place on his headstone if (when) he doesn’t return. A year of Cassian completely isolated from every single person in his life, in enemy territory, fighting and fearing for his life every single second.A year is an average time that top operatives survive in deep cover in Inner Rim and Core regions before they disappear.





	When You're Gone

**Author's Note:**

> Hello my dudes, here we go again! Welcome back to the Tales By Two Future Hopefully Wannabe Doctors Question Mark, fasten your seatbelts, have a merry ride.
> 
> Okay, so first of all, an apology is due. We (Storm & Spaceship) are not actually dead. We are simply dying a bit each and every day by our workload - speaking for myself (Storm), I'm working on my PhD, got a new job and am dealing with an increasingly frustrating domestic AND social situation that all combined are doing tons to a) make me wanna actually die, b) kill off most of my aspirations for writing *eyes the unfinished seminary work that is due at the end of March very nervously*. Actually, I love my school and I like my new job well enough (a nice change from the last one for sure) but life is getting very complicated, which is the reason of the long posting delay and quite probably the long delay before the next chapter (that is, if it gets finished - I know my record with that). Anyway, if you've stuck around this long you're magnificent I salute you.
> 
> Title of this fic is after When You're Gone by The Cranberries - RIP Dolores, the world is a bit sadder place without your voice in it.

Jyn Erso packs lightly. All she needs for herself is a set of dry clothes; a sweater, just in case; two scarves that can be shifted into a hood and a coat if the need arises; four concealed weapons; and extra boots. She advises Bodhi to also travel light - they might need to jump quickly, and that’s always easier to do with an empty shuttle than with a full one. Plus, they hardly know what they’re about to enter.

The only other thing she prepares to take with her is a backpack that she stuffed with as much of Cassian’s clothes that she could find (which is almost all that they rescued during their frantic escape from Hoth), a two-month stash of protein pills and all the medical supplies that the medbay would provide, whether they knew it or not.

She hoped to be gone before General Draven deduced that she’s been plotting something but the man’s senses on her are keener by day,  and so when she sees him walking towards her in the hangar of the Defiance she’s not even surprised.

“Lieutenant,” he says, nodding in her direction and stopping five or six feet from her.

“General,” she retorts back, straightening up, and paints her face with her most challenging expression. “You can’t stop me.”

“Hell knows that nobody can,” he mutters. “Even though I promised him to keep you safe here.”

“Well, that was quite stupid of you.” She picks up the bag with things for Cassian and throws it up the ramp into the shuttle. The demand sounds like one made by an idiot anyway, which is all she needs to know that if Cassian really said something like that he was out of his mind because usually, he’s pretty bright. All the more reasons to find him as soon as possible.

“I wish you would realize that lapses in check-ins during undercover assignments are nothing uncommon,” the general sighs like he knows she’s not listening to him anyway. Good. She really isn’t.

“He hasn’t made contact in two months,” Jyn replies, keeping her nerves in line. Barely. “From the bloody Imperial Capital.”

“He has gone on even longer before,” Draven shrugs. “I’m not sleeping any easier over this than you, Erso. I’m just well aware of what Major Andor is capable of.”

“He’s been listed as missing in action as of this morning,” Jyn says. “So there you go.”

“That’s classified.”

“I’m his fucking wife,” says the lieutenant and crosses her arms on her chest. “I should know what happens to him.”

Draven measures her with his stare for a long while. “I should report you for an unauthorized take-off and immediately reassign Rook to somewhere very far and miserable.”

“You must be mistaking us for people who care about that. Sir.” Her eyes are hard and cold, she knows. She has made bigger men than Davits Draven tremble in fear by looking them in the eyes. She has that gift.

“At ease, Lieutenant,” he responds in a firmer tone than before. “You know I should order you back and send an actually trained Intelligence agent to re-establish contact with Andor.”

“Frankly, _Sir,_ you should. You can even ground me to my room if you so please, but we both know that I’ll find a way to get out of here before the day is over no matter what you do to stop me. And if you think I’m going to twiddle my thumbs while someone other than me is looking for Cassian, you must be both daft _and_ insane.”

“That’s why I’m not stopping you,” he sighs and fishes a comm out of his pocket. “Despite my better judgment, I must add. Please report through this commlink when you land and hand it over to Andor when you find him. It might help him with future check-ins.”

She takes the tiny encrypted communicator from him and puts it into her pants pocket. “Thank you, sir. I will do that.”

“Yes, quite. And here, please…” he takes two steps closer to her, so that their hands and facer are mostly obscured to a casual viewer, and shows two small objects to Jyn, which she immediately recognized as rank epaulets. “Please pass my best regards to the Lieutenant Colonel. He’ll be given them when he can keep them. Tell him there’s much to discuss upon his arrival.”

Jyn almost wants to laugh. “I will forward the message, sir.”

“Good. And don’t get yourself or Rook killed, I’d hate to lose either of you.” The general’s eyes glisten suspiciously and his lower face is doing something which could, in normal circumstances, be a smile. “If you both come back in one piece I might be persuaded to look around for a set or two of spare Captain pips.”

“No rush,” Jyn says, but the smug look she gives him is slightly less acidic than normal.

“I’d advise you to rush,” he retorts, looking around. “I know for a fact that the next ten minutes, the log systems will be down for maintenance, so you can slip out freely. If you’re still around after that I will really have to report you. To myself, I might add.”

She turns to walk up the ramp. “Well then, see you around, General.”

“I hav no idea what you're talking about, Lieutenant Erso,” he says, turns around, walks down, and then the ramp closes behind Jyn.

She makes her way to the cockpit, Bodhi already waiting there for her.

“What did he want?” he asks, pointing back. “Is he gonna be trouble?”

“Not at all,” Jyn shakes her head and shows him the new commlink for Cassian. “I think we’ve got the closest thing to his blessing that we’re ever going to get.”

***

It all begins with their panicked, lightning-fast escape from Hoth. Bodhi runs full-speed before them to get the ship flying, only barely ducking out of other people’s way in order not to be flattened to the walls. The entire base is on red alert, people popping out from every direction and trying to get to the hangar as fast as possible. Bodhi's tiny frame is almost swallowed in the melee of bodies but he keeps pushing his way through like his life depends on it. Which, actually, it does.

Baze is after them, doing his best to keep up while also dragging Cassian with him. The spy really tries to run, he does. It’s his just-so-patched-together spine that is against them, the crippling flare-ups common in the hostile, freezing environment. Every time that happens, the captain is reduced to slow, measured steps and agonizing pain coming with every change of position. Like this, he hangs off Baze’s side with one arm thrown around the taller man’s neck and hopping forward as fast as his frozen feet allow. Baze does an admirable job steering them both out of people’s way so to minimize the risk of somebody colliding with them and hurting Cassian further. At least, the idiot has finally stopped ordering everyone to leave him behind at the slightest sign of danger ahead like he used to before (which has led to several occasions of the entire team threatening him with stuffing a week-worn sock into his mouth to shut him up, which was universally considered both embarrassing and an easily recognized empty threat, so it’s only good that they don’t have to resort to it anymore).

Jyn is behind them, one arm shoving people out of her way and the other bent at the elbow so that Chirrut can hold onto it and follow her way without feeling around with his staff. His senses are greatly helped by perceiving Jyn’s kyber crystal, now safely tucked under Cassian’s jacket after she made him wear it last time he went off planet alone and hasn’t yet thought of collecting it back. Now it comes in handy to be ahead of them, its vibrations working like a radar to Chirrut.

They finally reach their U-wing and pile into it just as Bodhi, breathing fast and hard, is heating up the engines with the help of K-2. They wait around just long enough to get five more passengers that would otherwise remain stranded on the base and at the Empire’s mercy. After that, they shoot into the stars and remain in constant motion for weeks, only stopping for a few hours once every few days to the most desolate places they can find and only to replenish resources and make sure that the Empire hasn’t declared its complete victory in the war yet.

The next time they see anyone from the High Command is when they dock in with the Redemption over Shilli. Luke Skywalker has a new mechanic hand and a crestfallen expression on his face whenever he thinks people aren’t looking, Han Solo is missing and Leia Organa seems to be fighting back tears when she sees Cassian enclosing Jyn in his arms upon hearing the news. She regains her grip on herself in a heartbeat, but her brief lapse in control is obvious enough for everyone to see that her relationship to the famously talkative smuggler-turned-Rebel isn’t nearly as bitter as she would like people to believe.

Jyn’s heart aches for her, but she says nothing, out of respect for the woman she came to see as a friend.

She doesn’t realize that her own time with her chosen one is nearing the end until it is all but over.

***

When he’s called into a classified meeting, she doesn’t expect anything out of the ordinary. They have just been dealt a major blow, it’s only natural that the higher-ups in Intelligence will want to review every single step they have taken in the last months and try to find out how they could cock up so colossally. Cassian doesn’t tell her outright what they have discussed - he never does, not when it’s something above her security clearance. He just drops a few hints here and there and lets her make out whatever she does on her own, without ratting out something that could land him in a court-martial. She realized some time ago that he had been intentionally leaving out some of the more worrying details about his solo missions, not wanting to cause her too much fright.

(If the concern came from anyone else, Jyn would have fought them, and she would win. When it comes from Cassian something stops her from lashing out, from claiming that she’s big enough, that she can take some gory details, that she wants the full picture and she wants it now. It takes her months to realize that she is the first person in his life in over twenty years whose feelings he even considers sparing and that she cannot take that from him, so she keeps silent and doesn’t let him know that she knows.

When she gets too curious, she simply has R-2 hack his mission reports, clearance be damned. If the Council really wanted to keep those files away from her, they should have them under better security. It’s so ridiculously easy to get to them that Jyn likes to think they are actually offering them to her on a silver plate, completely willingly.)

At first, she doesn’t suspect anything when he comes back from the meeting with Leia and General Draven. She notices that his face is pale and that there’s tension lacing through his movements but interprets that as results of the meeting that took hours on end, with little regard to Cassian’s physical disabilities (which, of course, he would never point out, even if it killed him).

It isn’t until they’re getting ready to sleep till Cassian says, “I’m leaving in four days.”

Jyn freezes, blanket in her hand, and sits down on the bed next to him.

He’s looking at the floor, not at her. “We need to know what the Empire is up to, now that they’ve got the high ground above us. We’re pretty sure that they’re up to something; they’d be stupid not to. Leia thinks there might be a leak somewhere in the command.” His shoulders drop even lower. “Draven doesn’t trust anyone else.”

Jyn should have expected that. It makes sense, really. Of course, she can’t keep one person she cares about close. “Deep cover?”

He nods. She can see his eyes, even though they’re not meeting hers. His gaze is empty.

“How long, do you think?” Jyn asks, knowing how stupid that question is. Undercover missions are tricky to time; deep cover ones almost impossible. Too often, a deep cover mission lasts for the rest of the agent’s life, or so the high-ups think when reports stop coming through.

Sometimes, pieces of those agents are found years later, scattered across the galaxy.

No, that is not a line of thought Jyn wants to pursue. Cassian isn’t gone yet, it’s preliminary to already start burying him. He’s sitting right next to her, for fuck’s sake.

He shrugs. “A year, they think. Maybe more.”

A year with no contact with him, no way of knowing whether he’s still alive, no way to know what date to place on his headstone if (when) he doesn’t return. A year of Cassian completely isolated from every single person in his life, in enemy territory, fighting and fearing for his life every single second.

A year is an average time that top operatives survive in deep cover in Inner Rim and Core regions before they disappear. That is what the Intelligence, 101 handbook in the form of whispers and unofficial stats says.

A year is all that Cassian’s got to live. One year, maybe a bit more.

Jyn’s heart sinks. She leans forward, pressing her face into the crook of his shoulder, wrapping her arms around him, and blinks furiously to stop the tears of anger and terror from coming.

“Do you have to go alone?” she asks when she can trust her voice again. She would go with him in a heartbeat, she would. She would do anything not to lose him.

He kisses the crown of her head, fleetingly, apologetically. “I’m sorry, Jyn.”

She tightens her hold on him and realizes that her breathing is far from even. “Just… don’t you dare not coming back, you hear me? Don’t you ever dare, or I’ll go and drag you back with my bare hands if I’ll have to.”

Cassian gives a weak laugh and holds her to him.

***

While Jyn didn’t hold many hopes that the four days before Cassian’s departure would mean any lighter schedule for him, the truth is that she barely even sees him at all. There are old identities to revive, new identities to craft, each one with a backstory he has to memorize to the minutest details, new mannerisms he has to adapt.  There is terrain mapping, though all she knows about that is that he will be sent first to Corellia, then to Coruscant, of all places (Jyn almost vomits at the thought of him being in the bloody Imperial capital without backup, and almost pleads to him not to go). There is a long itinerary list that needs to be assembled and Cassian has to be aware and familiar with every single item on it.

There are hours upon hours upon hours of confidential sessions with the Command that Jyn isn’t allowed to attend, so all she’s left to do is wait at the doors to snatch Cassian for a few minutes when there is a rare break and to walk back to their quarters with him when he’s so exhausted he can barely keep upright.

Their four days are up and there is nothing that either of them can do about it. Jyn knows, all too well, that no amount of begging and pleading from her would make Cassian abandon his duties to the Rebellion. She’s not even upset about it - she was aware who he was when they got together, and his loyalty is partly why she loves him the way she does. What she’s upset about is that this thing that she loves is going to be the thing that kills him.

On the morning of Cassian’s departure, Jyn is sitting on their bed, pulse and breathing still slowing after their possibly last ever time together, watching him dress and double-check his bags. Later she checks herself that he did indeed pack the bag of medications that Bones collected for him, knowing he will need it eventually, and slips a few bottles more in when he isn’t looking.

He takes her hand in his and together they walk to the docking bay where the rest of the party already waits, the bay mercifully otherwise almost devoid of any presence. All of Rogue One is quite uncomfortable as no one wants to be the first one to acknowledge the direness of the situation. General Draven then comes and takes Cassian aside for a few minutes, claiming “some last minute paperwork”, which essentially means that he wants to spare Cassian’s friends the sight of him scribbling down his last will.

After that, the goodbyes get positively unbearable for everyone included.

Kay has to be reminded to stick with Bodhi now and to keep his mouth shut (which he won’t anyway, and nobody would want him to be any different).

Baze has the same expression he wore when his teeth were aching last time when he pulls the younger man to him and says, “If you die, I will find you and kill you again myself, my friend.”

Chirrut tells him that the Force is always with him, but to be careful anyway. His hand lingers on the spy’s cheek for a second too long, yet not nearly long enough for comfort.

Bodhi looks like he is about to cry and hugs Cassian tight enough to break a few ribs, but the major hardly even notes with all the adrenaline already flooding his body.

Jyn loses her battle against the tears and lets herself be swallowed by Cassian’s embrace, lets the whispered proclamations of his devotion fall into her ears like hearing them could change the fact that she will most likely never see him again.

She tries to commit every single fact about this into her memory - the smell of his jacket, the grip of his arms around her middle, the way she has to stand on her tiptoes to be able to put her chin on his shoulder, his scruff rough against her cheek - she wants to memorize all of it, and never forget a single second she spent with him.

The long goodbye is seemingly just as drastic on Cassian as it is on her because when he lets go of her with a quiet “stay safe” his eyes are red, just like Jyn’s. He turns and walks up to the shuttle, not looking back.

He only stops when General Draven crosses his way and puts his arms on the younger man’s shoulders. The hangar bay is almost empty save for their little company, and Jyn can hear Draven saying “Best of luck, son,” to Cassian from several dozen feet away. It is that moment that nearly breaks her - even the general acknowledges that they are about to lose Cassian for good, and there’s not a single thing they can do to change it.

The spoils of war fall on them all.

Her husband accepts his fate with his head held high like he always does, but his face betrays him for a second. The shock at his mentor’s farewell bleeds through, along with the fear. He schools his expression back to as close to indifference as he can at the moment, but he’s not fooling anyone anymore.

(He’s not afraid of death - he doesn’t want to die, not anymore, not when what he’s been fighting for all his life is so close now. He’s so familiar with death and destruction that it feels like he’s died ten thousand times already. But for all the time he’s spent undercover under the Empire’s nose it has never been this close, with such a high risk of early exposure. Any other time, such mission would be deemed a waste of perfectly good personnel, but times are that desperate. Cassian Andor is not afraid of dying, he is afraid of what will come if they manage to catch him by surprise if they have him subdued before precautions for his eternal silence are taken. He has interrogated enough Imperial officers to know what happens to Rebel spies who get caught alive.

If that happens, he hopes the Force to be merciful enough to not let his family ever know.)

Jyn watches the shuttle raise from the floor. It climbs up, re-arranges its thrusters from lift to flight and then, with a finality that is no less than crushing, lights up all its reflectors at once for a second, like a final wave of goodbye before gliding through the force field of the gate door and disappearing into hyperspace.

She doesn’t break down sobbing, despite being really close to it. She has some dignity left, after all, and they always knew that a day would come when their duty would bring an end to them. She had years to get ready, it just doesn’t make it any easier at this moment.

This feels like the end, Jyn thinks darkly, as the day goes by and her friends seem too scared to leave her alone for a single second. She can’t find it in herself to be annoyed by it.

She ends up sleeping on the spare bunk in Chirrut and Baze’s quarters, with a very unshakeable Bodhi bringing in his cot next to hers, holding her hand in the dark and trying to appear like his nerves aren’t splitting into threads.

***

Twelve standard days after Cassian’s departure, Jyn receives a message from General Draven. Upon opening the note, she realizes that it is a forwarded log that was received by the Intelligence from an encrypted comm, stating simply that Cassian has safely reached Corellia and activated his source network there.

 _He’s alive,_ she tells herself, _he’s alive, not captured, not dead._

She dresses his old captain jacket, the one he wore when they first met, and doesn’t walk out of her quarters without it for months.

***

She gets forwarded messages as often as she can. It’s never too much, not with her level of clearance - Draven knows very well that she lets her friends read them as well. They’re just enough for her to know that Cassian is alive, moderately healthy, and quite busy with his assignment. He has abandoned several covers and created new ones before relocating to Coruscant, but so far none of his identities have been blown.

 _He’s as safe as he can be,_ is what Jyn knows.

He fails to report in three weeks into his stay on Coruscant but establishes contact on his next window a week later. He was impersonating an Imperial officer and making contact would be too risky, is what he says, but all is fine and silences are to be expected.

He misses another window two weeks later, then reports in hastily in a few coded words, and then isn’t heard from again.

***

She tries not to go mad with worry, she really does. She knew this was likely going to happen, is what she repeats to herself. It’s time to make peace with it. She can learn to live not knowing whether she’s already a widow or not just yet. It doesn’t bother her too much.

Truth is, over the last few years Jyn Erso got really bad at lying to herself.

***

Once upon a time, Jyn Erso would have counted her losses, realize she was being left behind by yet another person, have an inner cry about it, have an outer shrug about it, and walk on her merry way without looking back.

In this new life that she has built around hopes and people and feelings, she realizes that maybe this time, she doesn’t have to be left behind; that this time, she can choose to let go, or choose to reach on and grab him by the hand. That maybe this time, she could become the one who has done nothing to stay together.

In this new life, Jyn Erso decides not to allow the Empire to take one more thing from her, even if it means parting with the safety net she’s woven around herself on this ship, with these people, with this cause - because there’s a substantial part of her reason to stay that is currently missing and maybe already gone, and that’s something Jyn will simply not allow.

So, Jyn Erso does what she does best.

She decides to rebel on the Rebels.

What she doesn’t count for, however, is that she might not be the only one with the same point of view.

“I will fly you,” says Bodhi, right after Jyn confesses her plan to go rogue on the Rebellion yet again.

“Bodhi, no,” she whispers, stealing worried glances around. They are alone in the hallway but somebody might always be listening. “You worked so hard for your place here and for their respect. Don’t blow it up now. I can manage on my own.”

“Nonsense,” Bodhi shakes his head. “Look, I was promised a leave ages ago, might just as well take it now. I’ll take Baze and Chirrut somewhere nice, not too destroyed by the war, like Volik. It will be nice. So what if we make a slight detour to Coruscant and give you a lift?”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Jyn says. “Volik is the other way around from us now than Coruscant. Across half of the Outer Rim.”

Bodhi shrugs. “It has a bucketful of waterfalls. Chirrut says he’s never seen even one in his life.”

She leans over to him and places a soft kiss on his scarred cheek, blinking away tears of gratitude. “You’re the best, Bodhi. Don’t ever let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

He pulls her into his arms. “He’s my friend too. It’ll be okay, Jyn.”

  
  



End file.
